Back to: How to Build a Similar ELN

One of the main reasons to upgrade the GeoDirectory plugin to the pro version is to allow the ability to have more than one custom post type. WordPress was originally built for blogging and so the WordPress post type has been used for blogs from the beginning. Over time, WordPress was expanded with the ability to use other custom content types that have many other fields than those that are needed in a blog. These custom content types are known as custom post types or CPTs in WordPress.

In its free version, the GeoDirectory plugin has only one CPT called Places. By upgrading to the pro version of GeoDirectory we can create multiple CPTs and name them appropriately and attach appropriate field types to them. In the case of the low-cost ELN presented here, we added a CPT called Soil Samples. Therefore, there are two CPTs in this version of a low cost ELN – Places and Soil Samples. These two CPTs have the same field types associated with them but that does not need to be the case. The different CPTs in GeoDirectory could have different sets of fields. Separate CPTs could be used to collect different types of data in the case of a WordPress ELN.

Another useful feature in the pro version of GeoDirectory is the ability to filter samples using different field values or facets of the sample. In the free version of GeoDirectory, we are limited to filtering the samples only by the categories. Categories are set by the admin and in the case of the soil samples in this low-cost ELN the categories are the results of the testing, namely combinations of positive or negative paraoxon and methyl parathion. But with the pro version of GeoDirectory we can filter on additional facets. For the soil samples, these facets include the organization, course term, year of course, and lab day and can be sen by selecting the soil sample type on the directory page and then clicking the gear icon to the right of the search boxes. These facets are configurable by whoever is setting up the sample being collected. This faceted filtering can be very helpful for large data sets.